He squatted frozen during a terrified span of time. The soldier died with a bubbling sound. McKuen took away the man’s submachine gun and ammunition magazines; he spun away in panic and ran blindly through the jungle. His foot caught on an exposed root: he landed belly-flat in the mud, bruising his face. His hands clawed the earth. The chopper was hard and cold, underneath him; he rolled off and got it in his grasp and peered around him with wide eyes.
Voices called querulously back and forth across the night. McKuen rubbed the stubble along his jaw. Everywhere he looked, he thought he saw figures moving through the woods. Paralyzing fear rippled through him, gripping him by the groin. He fingered the cold submachine gun and looked around furtively. What now? Do I sit and wait and win the prize?
“To hell with that,” he muttered. Arrogant temper pressed his lips together. He moved away from the dead man and, abruptly, a remembered deviltry sparkled in his eyes. He exhaled a fluttering gust of air. The jungle hummed with a light wind, and a wicked flame leapt in him. He stabbed his legs into the ground and broke into a wild run.
Up and running, he wondered why he was doing this. He felt like a pinned insect. He dropped flat.
Far to his right a rifle opened up, steadily pounding the air. He could not see its muzzle flame. It did not seem to be directed at him. He got up and ran across an open quagmire of mud and went into the trees like a racing diver. He hit flat on his chest and slid across slimy liquid; he scrambled past a tree and lay with blood pumping red in his eyes and his body heaving. The gunfire stopped. Someone was moving through the jungle, and he looked around until he thought he saw something; he trained the submachine gun on it and held the trigger back.
The gun rocked against him, coughing, and in the blinking flashes he saw a helmeted soldier collapsing a joint at a time in little jerky moments of light like a very old silent moving-picture. And then darkness and silence again.
Hostile bullets broke the night up, seeking him furiously. They rattled around the jungle, cut down a branch overhead, and dropped the branch on him. He huddled with his knees drawn up against his chest, his back to a tree. The guns quieted down, dissatisfied. An insect crawled over the back of his hand. The afterglow of one muzzle’s flame remained in his vision, and he tried to remember exactly where it had been in the woods. He lifted the chopper slowly and aimed it in that direction and held it, not firing, not knowing what he was going to do until someone stepped on something that snapped. The rifle he had looked for fired. McKuen, sitting still, heard a man’s scream of pain. It echoed in his mind and he thought, They’ve killed one of their own men. He heard the scratching of slow movement and realized that the soldier was not dead, but off there bleeding. The soldier’s moan came to McKuen’s ears. He tried to put it away, but after a little while he lifted the chopper’s muzzle half an inch and pressed the trigger. He bit his tongue and swept the jungle with fire until the chopper ran out of bullets.
Like an ejaculation, the burst of fire left him limp and uninterested. Nothing stirred. The chopper was hot under his hand; smoke bit into his nostrils. He released the magazine and replaced it. The dying soldier moaned once, and was still. McKuen became violently sick. He retched into the mud.
Afterward he rolled away from the smell of it, but the smell came with him. He turned to his left and moved slowly through the trees. The gun was heavy, and the air chilled his sweating face. His mouth tasted terrible: dry, sticky, foul, morbid.
He swung behind a tree and searched the dark. Impatience boosted him away. He walked around, putting an unlit cigarette between his teeth. His feet followed each other into the night. He had lost his bearings, but it did not seem to matter. His face was streaked with sweat and dirt.
A small movement halted him. A man — or a branch stirred by wind? His damp clothes clung flat to his back. He shifted his weight. That small sound made the shadowed mass move in his vision, and he saw the fragmentary race of light along the length of a gun barrel. Curious, cautious, the other stepped forward into better light, and McKuen shot him down.
He dropped prone and wriggled to the base of a thick tree, half submerged in mud. Three rifles and an automatic weapon were talking, all of them aimed at the spot where he had stood a moment before. That’s all of them, he thought calmly. Four men. He fired a long burst at one of the flashing rifles and the rifle went silent; McKuen rolled away from the tree and ran humpbacked through the jungle while the three remaining guns, none of them very far away, increased their fire angrily. He tripped, and felt a soft object under him. One of the men he had killed. The man carried a pair of grenades.
McKuen tossed one of them at the chattering automatic weapon. He thought, I’ve got a Goddamn charmed life. Nothing can touch me. The grenade did not go off. He pulled the pin of the second grenade and threw it after the first.
The explosion lit up the jungle. Something stung his ribs along the right side of his body. The automatic weapon went silent and so did one of the rifles nearby. McKuen thought, I’m hit. He saw the one remaining rifle chugging red blossoms off at an angle, not shooting toward him at all. McKuen chopped down with the submachine gun and braced it against his arm and held the trigger back, sweeping the district until all the guns but his own were dead.
He wheezed like an engine and sat down crosslegged in the forest. His side was bleeding, cut open along a ragged scratch. Not a bullet, he thought. Not a bullet. Shrapnel from that Goddamn grenade I threw. Hoist by me own bloody petard.
He made a bandage and lay back chewing on the unlit cigarette. That was when his hand began to shake. The tremor came slowly and grew worse. Presently his body shook. He had to lie flat. His lips jerked into a grin. “I am a bloody hero. Who’d ever believe that? A bloody war hero.”
He stood up. “A bloody dead hero’s what I am,” he muttered. The jungle was impenetrable. It was four o’clock in the morning, and there was no light. He did not know how far he had come away from the Sang Chu gorge. He did not know which way to go. But he turned around on his heels, a full circle, and he said, “That way,” and he walked into the jungle, dragging the submachine gun by its barrel.
Chapter Forty-one
0400 Hours
“Take ten,” Tyreen said. He put his back to a rock and slid down to sit on the damp earth. Forty yards below him the jungle began again, unrolling across the valley. He could see the mountains a dozen miles away, the upper end of the high gorge breaking starkly out of the forest.
Saville and Hooker laid down the stretcher and Eddie Kreizler rolled his head toward Tyreen. “Magiccarpet treatment,” Kreizler said. His tone bespoke his belligerent fight against the effects of pain.
Nguyen Khang climbed higher on the mountain to search the valley. Tyreen sat back and let his chugging lungs settle down. He swallowed a capsule and felt the small number of them left in the tin in his pocket; he allowed himself a dreary moment’s anticipation of the hours ahead. Kreizler said, “I’m hungry as hell,” and Saville found a ration for him. J. D. Hooker’s cropped head tipped forward against his chest; his flat face was dull. Across the valley the rough hat and spear contours of the heights stood against a mottled, half-broken sky, graying up in false dawn. Flows of mist filled pockets on the hills, and when Sergeant Khang came sliding down from his reconnaissance he said, “Going to warm up today, I think. Can’t see much down there.”